Is it just me, or is it just getting too much now? The
constant talk, so-called "expert analysis', endless trite journalistic
commentary, minute probing of every possible element of the party leaders'
purported personalities, cameras and microphones extended ruthlessly into every
conceivable party-political orifice, and all of this played over and over again
ad nauseum.

Last night's final leader's "debate' was the clincher. After
all these weeks of cheap point-scoring and badly aimed pot-shots on all sides,
the last debate felt like listening to the same broken record, except slightly
more out-of-tune and now almost excruciating to hear again.

The Three Stooges

Nothing new in the debate, no meaningful elaboration of
anything that's been said, but instead each leader standing behind the firing
line, indulging in the same banal repetition of exactly the same slogans and
quick-fix supposed "policy' solutions to micro-issues, without ever even daring
to address the real
fundamental problems we, and the world, are now facing. Indeed, nothing
really seems to be any clearer than it was before the debates started. Now we
have a better idea of who wants power. But most people still don't feel like
the debates have helped them make their minds up. In fact, many people feel more
confused than ever.

Of course, there are a few interesting points of difference
between the parties. Lib Dems' insistence on re-thinking our dependence on the
Cold War-era Trident nuclear system is interesting, and inspired by the common
sense notion that spending billions on a militarization process we'll never use
makes no sense in the midst of a recession (if ever). So is their idea to
break-up the banks to separate speculative investment activities from the
high-street retail sector where most of us put our savings. And their proposals
to "clean-up' politics starting with harder regulation of MPs to make them
meaningfully accountable strikes a chord.

But after listening to Nick Clegg pretty much repeat the
sametired sloganeering about the "old
parties', and "doing something different', even he started to grate on me.

The problem is that none of the parties display any real
understanding of the economic
mess we're in. Gordon Brown, who continuously illustrates that he has about
as much ministerial charisma as a dead fish, has succeeded only in guaranteeing
that he's out of the race. The more he speaks, the more I want to run and hide.
He looks, and sounds, like a strange, shrunken, Anglo-Scottish version of the
Incredible Hulk in a suit.

People do, indeed, want "change'. That's why what Brown's
actually saying no longer has any relevance. The more you see him, the more you
want to see less of him. The public are fed-up. We never elected him in the
first-place, and now here he is, looking and sounding more and more desperate.

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But Clegg and David Cameron hardly fare any better. Both of
them now come across as political prostitutes, desperately and shamelessly
trying to auction themselves to the highest bidder. Cameron, looking for all
the world like a wax-doll in Madam Tussauds, now innovates the idea of the "Big
Society', supposedly challenging the "old' Tory fundamental, laid down famously
by Margaret Thatcher, that "there is no such thing as society'. Beneath the
rhetoric, however, is exactly the same Tory principle after all these years.
Thatcher's deification of the "the individual' was an euphemism for "small'
government, but only small relative to the relegation of power to the private
sector.

What's changed with Cameron? He talks about "values' and
"coming together', but the "Big Society' is another way of advocating precisely
what Thatcher wanted a "small' government, but only small relative to the
relegation of power to the private sector. Cameron's unspecified talk of
"social enterprises' is simply paving the way for deregulated private power to
have a bigger stake in social and community projects. But at least Cameron has
some sort of charisma, however contrived. In the last debate in particular, he retained
a calm, decisive demeanour. No doubt, he has class. Of the Etonian variety, but it's more watchable than the
Anglo-Scottish Hulk.

Clegg might offer some alternative ideas, but he's
increasingly found it hard to do more than wave his hands around Blair-style
while going on about the "old parties' trying to score political points
forgetting that he's now indulging in the same cheap point-scoring. Having said
that, of the three, he and the Lib Dems are perhaps the least morally
compromised, having been exiled from power for 65 years, which is perhaps why
on some issues they're happy to think out of the box.

The irony is that after listening to these three and their
minions drone on and on trying to sell themselves in their desperation to
secure their political careers, it remained decidedly unclear whosepolicy-prescriptions were actually superior.
No wonder, then, that if the polls are anything to go by, Cameron's lessons in
body-language and PR sloganeering complete with shiny squeaky-clean wax-doll
presentation put him in the lead.

Let's not have any illusions that the seeming preference for
Cameron means that the public have any clue what he and his party are actually
saying, and proposing to do. The best indication of where the British public
lies in terms of policy is in the outcome of the survey of the (ever-growing)
sample of over 210,000 people by VoteforPolicies.org.uk.
The website allows you to answer a carefully constructed multiple-choice
questionnaire identifying your policy favourites (without naming the six
parties they come from) on the big issues like the economy, healthcare, crime,
democracy, the environment, and so on; then automatically analyses the results
to situate which party, or parties, your favourites fit with.

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The results at 11pm this Friday morning are really
surprising, and illustrate that in terms of actual policy, the majority of the
public is far left of field than all the mainstream parties. Amazingly, the Green
Party is in the lead at 25 per cent; Labour in second-place at 19 per cent; Lib
Dems nearly head-to-head with them at 18 per cent; Conservatives at 15.99 per
cent; with the ultra-right UK Independent Party and BNP snailing away at 11 per
cent and 10 per cent respectively.

So Cameron's growing success is not down to his policies.
It's down to his shiny face, which has grown in shininess in direct proportion
to donations the Tories have received. Indeed, the Tories are clearly the party
favoured overwhelmingly by British
capital, raking in by week two 2.2 million, compared to Labour's 1.5
million and a paultry 120,000 for the Lib Dems (the bulk of which came from
a "non-dom', although Clegg described this practice as "wholly wrong" when
criticising Lord Ashcroft's donations to the Tories so much for hating
"point-scoring').

Britain's corporate classes had, indeed, made their decision
some time ago, indicated by the fact that the Tories had raised 11
million in the last three months of 2009 compared to 5 million by Labour.
In other words, the party with the smoothest PR campaign machinery is
Cameron's. The polls are a reflection, inevitably in the circumstances, not
only of the success of the Tory money machine, but of the extent to which
British democracy remains beholden to powerful vested interests.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the 'System Shift' column for VICE's Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work.